The World’s Most Stunning Moths Will Set Your Heart Aflutter

Emmet Gowin’s unlikely love affair with moths started 20 years ago in Ecuador. Driving up a mountain road one night, his guide pulled over and set up a powerful light. Over the next three hours, Gowin watched in awe as hundreds of moths fluttered out of the forest toward the glow. “They’re all so exquisitely beautiful and unpredictable,” he says.

He went on to photograph more than 1,000 moth species in Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, French Guiana and Panama for his new book, Mariposas Nocturnas: Moths of Central and South America, A Study in Beauty and Diversity. And in a stunning departure from most collections of entomology photography, nearly all of Gowin’s moths are alive…